The Importance of Customer Loyalty for Your Spa (and what you can do about it!)

As the manger or owner of a spa, what’s the first thing you would do to grow your spa’s business?

If you’re like most people, you’re probably thinking that attracting new customers is the right answer.

Well, sorry to burst your bubble, but no. The best way to grow your spa is to focus on your client retention, and by extension, your customer loyalty. When you’re solely focused on attracting new customers, you’re forfeiting a lot of your revenue. It costs 6-7 times more to acquire a new customer than it does to sell to an existing one. It’s that existing base that you want to keep happy.

Your customer loyalty is an incredible driving force behind your business’ bottom line. It opens up the chance for you to engage better with your customers, helps bring in more repeat business, and increases your profits. With repeat customers spending 67% more than new customers, it’s easy to see how.

When you’re running your spa, there are so many things going on in your day to day, sometimes it's hard to even wrap your head around tactics to grow your business.

This is a basic, yet effective, method for garnering some repeat business amongst your existing customers. You can supply your clients with a loyalty punch card at the close of their first visit. Whether they decide to punch a slot for each visit or for each incremental amount spent, your clients look forward to earning the free treatment.

Points System

Setting up a simple points system is another basic but easy strategy for creating loyalty.

Begin by setting 'value' to points -- what does it take to earn a single point at your spa?

For example:

$1 spent = 1 point earned (it’s important to note that points are not able to be redeemed for cash)

Now that you’ve established the value of your points, you can start assigning different points to different behaviors:

Customer Referral = 500 points

Each appointment booked through spa app = 250 points

Each appointment made through pre-booking = 250 points

Appointments made for birthdays = 300 points

Once you’ve assigned points to each behavior you can then assign rewards for collecting a set number of points:

Once a customer has earned 1000 points, he/she would be eligible to redeem for gift certificates or discounts on massage treatments.

VIP Love

Give your customers the VIP treatment they deserve, especially to the customers that continue to show loyalty to your spa. This goes along a more tiered rewards program (that works in conjunction with a points system) in which you can include additional and special rewards for the most frequent and loyal clients.

Giving clients VIP status can open them up to exclusive spa deals, discounts on several of the retails items on sale at your spa, specials on select treatments and much more.

Get Social

In today’s digital world, it’s both easy and very important to stay connected via the various social channels available. When it comes to the spa industry, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, are all great platforms.

Ask your clients to post about their experiences on their different social accounts and request for them to tag your spa’s account handle along with it.

Reward them for each of their posts with either rewards points or access to spa specials and discounts.

About the Author

Aditi Vora is a skilled digital marketer with a passion for content marketing and exploring new and fun ways to keep her audience informed and engaged. She's currently the Senior Manager of Content at Booker Software.